Friedrich Kluge (21 June 1856 – 21 May 1926) was a German philologist and educator. He is known for the Etymological Dictionary of the German Language (Etymologisches Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache), which was first published in 1883.

Biography

Kluge was born in Cologne. He studied comparative linguistics and classical and modern philologies at the universities of Leipzig, Strasbourg and Freiburg. As a student, his instructors were August Leskien, Georg Curtius, Friedrich Zarncke and Rudolf Hildebrand at Leipzig and Heinrich Hübschmann, Bernhard ten Brink and Erich Schmidt at the University of Strasbourg. He became a teacher of English and German philology at Strassburg (1880), an assistant professor of German at the University of Jena in 1884, a full professor in 1886, and in 1893 was appointed professor of German language and literature at Freiburg as a successor to Hermann Paul. A Proto-Germanic sound law that he formulated in a paper in 1884 is now known as Kluge's law. He died in Freiburg, Germany.

Works

For Hermann Paul's "Grundriss der germanischen Philologie" he wrote "Vorgeschichte der altgermanischen Dialekte" (1897) and "Geschichte der englischen Sprache" (1899). In 1900 he founded the journal "Zeitschrift für deutsche Wortforschung".